negotiation, the whole process, play as the soviet union teetered toward an end? >> i'm not sure it had that much direct effect. i would say that ends being the arms race -- because this was the beginning of ending the arms race. it took a treaty and series of others to do so. and took the liberation of eastern europe, which went as a separate process. but i would say that these things actually freed up gorbachev to try to reform the system. it took the pressure off of him. as long as we had the arms race they had an excuse not for changing the system. once you end the cold war, not just the arms race, and gorbachev ended it ideologically december 7, 1988. today is also an anniversary of that. xactly a year after he signed the i.n.f. treaty. what he ended in that speech aside from announcing unilateral reductions in their military, he discarded the class struggle as the rationale for soviet foreign policy. that was the rationale that had kept the communist party as the dictatorship in the country. so the end of the cold war permitted the reforms that gorbachev sta